But I think there might be a little confusion when it looks so tidy as that.
This post is my best attempt to muss it up a bit so it won't be swallowed whole and misunderstood.
It is not a tidy thing, friend-ship. It is a rollicking barge in a tsumani (now that you've all seen that footage, I feel even better about using the image). It is dangerous, large, carrying so much weight and yet daring to stay afloat.
Having repented of so many things over the course of my life I know I better keep it up. If you turn from one thing only once you will have to stand still with your back on half the world. So I keep turning, spiraling upward in widening circles of acceptance and hope. If I stop turning for too long I begin to lose my sense of movement.
So I keep moving,
which is as much to say, I keep moving.
We have entered the stage in pregnancy demarcated by the movements of the unborn-the feelings like you've swallowed a rock just before the loop on a roller coaster or the one that means someone is head butting your bladder. And it is teaching me that even the tiniest movements can cause great pain or great excitement. Such movements teach us about ourselves and the world we inhabit whether it is a womb or a tomb.
Just before we moved to Washington DC a very wise friend told me that moving means movement and that is good. He helped me to see that movement might require moving, even if I really wanted to stay in one place.
Remember, I whisper to myself,
knowing about locatedness does not require a certain amount of time in a certain place and
stagnant waters are excellent breeding grounds for mosquitos, which is part of the process but even mosquitos grow up and fly away and
holding still is really good but holding loosely is important also.
So when the earth is on the move and tsunami borne friendships barge in on my plan to be unabashedly brave in the face of all that I will sacrifice to be a good enough mother I want to refuse to give in to guilt I feel that I no longer have the energy to devote to friends who have comprised my family... because I have somehow, miraculously, come into a totally different configuration of family: my own.
The books about pregnancy don't mention that I will feel as though I am abandoning my friends and family. They don't say much about the grief we will all feel now that I am missing out on all the milestone markers you invite me to attend. So I'm left to my own thoughts on the topic.
I feel the movement within me: someone I've never met surpassing everyone who has held me dear.
It's all I can do to remember the woman I have been to you and with you is still here within me.
I am here. I will be here. But I will be there, too. I am for you, even if I'm not "here for you" in the traditional sense. I am "with you" even if we aren't mounting side by side bar stools, sliding between the same two pews, climbing the stairs in step or plying each other with two-ply separated only by the stall wall.
So I thought I should look it up on the log of advice and hope I have tried to offer myself and all of you in the past and I found this:
"4/23/2009
so here is the life lesson i am learning and it sucks to have to learn it but that is just what it is--no more and no less:
the onus is always on me to remember that any and all accusations do not account for all the good i am capable of and all the righteous risk i am willing to take,
and all the ways that even the best work can hurt or cost us and that
pain is pain and also prevalent
and though i may participate it is less and less likely,
as i become an increasingly compassionate person, that i am the cause of that pain or that i can't work with that pain when i do cause it (because i undoubtedly will),
to deepen relationship through reconciliation.
the onus is always on me to remember that any and all accusations do not account for all the good i am capable of and all the righteous risk i am willing to take,
and all the ways that even the best work can hurt or cost us and that
pain is pain and also prevalent
and though i may participate it is less and less likely,
as i become an increasingly compassionate person, that i am the cause of that pain or that i can't work with that pain when i do cause it (because i undoubtedly will),
to deepen relationship through reconciliation.
and it might come across like i am well adjusted, with lots of good ideas but i just have to tell you, today, a thursday of very little consequence,
i just don't know what to do about all that but i'm telling you because i think you will understand and that makes me feel a lot better. because even if i'm not actually a better person, i am at least not feeling awful about the person i am and i think that is
really important."
i just don't know what to do about all that but i'm telling you because i think you will understand and that makes me feel a lot better. because even if i'm not actually a better person, i am at least not feeling awful about the person i am and i think that is
really important."
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